A Year in the South (2 page)

1. Major sites mentioned in the book

P
ROLOGUE

FOUR SOUTHERNERS

Louis Hughes was thirty-two years old when the year 1865 began, and he was a slave—a mulatto slave, born of a black mother and a white father. The memoir he published in his old age is a vivid and in many ways frank reminiscence, but it is curiously reticent about his paternity. In it Louis mentions but does not name his father, though he certainly knew who he was. Nor does he explain his own surname, which was not that of his mother's master or any of his own subsequent masters.
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In his memoir, Louis Hughes does relate that he was born in Virginia, near Charlottesville, in 1832. At about age eleven he was sold away from his mother to a man who lived nearby. A few months later he was taken to Richmond and sold to another man. Louis never saw his mother again. In 1844 his owner got fed up with the boy's sickliness and decided to dispose of him. He put him on the auction block in a Richmond slave market and sold him for $380. The buyer was a Mississippi planter named Edmund McGehee, whom Louis would come to call Boss.
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Louis and some others bought by McGehee soon set out from Richmond, heading southward to Georgia and then westward to their new home in Mississippi. They were among the many thousands of slaves brought from the older regions of the South in the antebellum years to clear and plant the fresh lands on the expanding cotton frontier. When McGehee's newly purchased laborers arrived at his Pontotoc County plantation in late December 1844, he singled out the twelve-year-old Louis, brought him to the Big House, and gave him to his wife, Sarah, as a Christmas present.
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Motherless, friendless, and traumatized by his abrupt uprooting, Louis grieved for a long time but gradually adapted to his new life. Duty as a houseboy exempted him from much of the drudgery of plantation labor but kept him at the beck and call of Mrs. McGehee (known to the slaves as Madam), who was bad-tempered and abusive. Louis soon came to loathe her. He grew more or less fond of Boss, however, who recognized Louis's intelligence and occasionally took the boy away from housework to assist him in some task. But Boss, too, had a cruel streak.
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2. Louis Hughes, ca. 1897

Around 1850 Louis's circumstances changed again. Boss, who had become quite wealthy, built a magnificent mansion on a fourteen-acre estate two miles outside Memphis. There he moved his family and a dozen or more of his slaves, including Louis, whom he appointed butler and manservant. At the same time, he sold his Pontotoc plantation and bought another in Bolivar County, Mississippi, on the banks of the Mississippi River below Memphis. He put this property in the charge of an overseer.
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By the early 1850s Louis Hughes had grown to manhood. Slight of build and standing just five and a half feet tall, he was hardly an imposing figure. But he was smart, and he was resolute: he had by then made up his mind that he was not going to live out his life as a slave if he could help it.
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What sparked Louis's quest for freedom was an epiphany of a kind that every enslaved man and woman eventually experienced. He was now a grown man, and yet, he came to see, slavery denied him full manhood. His master and mistress continued to scold and slap him like a child, continued to dictate his every activity from the minute he rose in the morning until he went to bed at night. That such humiliations were accompanied by a good measure of paternalistic care and indulgence made them no less demeaning.
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Most adult slaves thus came to hate slavery and yearn for freedom. Louis Hughes came to hate and yearn more deeply than some because of the nearly unbearable circumstances in the McGehee household. To the daily cruelties of Madam were added the not-infrequent barbarities of Boss and other white men in his employ. Most Southern slaves, after weighing the miseries of their situation against the dangers of resistance, reluctantly accommodated themselves to slavery; but Louis was impelled to challenge the institution. Twice in the 1850s he ran off by stowing away on a steamboat at the Memphis wharf. Both times he was caught and returned to his master.
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Louis was living at the Memphis estate when the Civil War began in the spring of 1861. By then he was about twenty-nine years old and had been married for two and a half years. His wife, Matilda, was a cook purchased by Boss in 1855.
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When the Union army and navy advanced down the Mississippi River in the spring of 1862 and threatened Memphis, Boss abandoned his estate and took his family and slaves to Panola County, in northern Mississippi, where his father-in-law, John “Master Jack” McGehee, lived. Soon thereafter Louis was sent to the Bolivar plantation and was kept there until early 1863. He then was sent back to Panola, where he rejoined his wife and the McGehee family.
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The outbreak of war and the coming of the Yankees excited Louis and others who sought freedom. Across the South, blacks whispered among themselves at rumors of Union victories and watched for a chance to flee to the invaders. At the same time, war and invasion magnified white Southerners' fear of black restlessness and their determination to stifle it. In the winter of 1862–63 Louis tried a third time to escape, setting out overland toward the rumored location of a Union army force. But he blundered into a company of Confederate troops who returned him to captivity. A couple of months later, encouraged by reports that other Panola County slaves were getting away, Louis tried again. This time he headed toward Memphis, which was now in Union hands. Matilda and three others joined him in this attempt. The five were swiftly tracked down and brought back to Master Jack's plantation.
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By the spring of 1863, Boss—forced by Yankee incursions to abandon his Bolivar plantation, too—had decided to move most of his slaves to a safe place deep in the Confederacy's interior. At a site on the Tombigbee River in Alabama the state government, using leased slaves, manufactured salt. Louis and Matilda Hughes were sent to the saltworks along with other McGehee slaves. They were there in early January 1864, when they learned that Boss had died unexpectedly while preparing to move his family to Alabama. They were still at the saltworks one year later, on the first day of 1865.
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*   *   *

When 1865 began, Cornelia McDonald was forty-two years old and living in a rented house in Lexington, Virginia, with her seven children. She was a widow and a war refugee. The death of her husband, a Confederate army officer, and the loss of her home had brought her to the verge of poverty and despair.

She was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1822, the youngest child of Humphrey and Anne Peake. Her father was a physician who, although not wealthy, was well off, and Cornelia grew up being waited on by slaves and driven about in a carriage. While she was still a girl, the family moved to rural Prince William County, where her father pursued farming along with medicine. Later they settled in the hamlet of Front Royal in the Shenandoah Valley. Cornelia thus became acquainted with farm and village as well as town life. She developed a passion for horseback riding but was also drawn to intellectual and artistic pursuits: reading, writing, drawing, and painting. She loved browsing in her father's library and wandering through the countryside with her sketchbook in hand. As one of her daughters later wrote, “Everything that happened interested her.”
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In 1835 the family moved to Palmyra in eastern Missouri. Though no longer a true frontier area by that time, it was raw and wild by contrast to genteel Virginia. For the rest of her life Cornelia retained vivid memories of her Palmyra years, especially of riding out onto the prairie and galloping through head-high grass with her black maidservant mounted behind her, and of watching wide-eyed as thousands of Potawatomi Indians passed on the road, heading westward to a reservation. But there were painful memories of Palmyra, too. Anne Peake died there in 1837, leaving fifteen-year-old Cornelia motherless. Anne was bedridden for months before her death, and Cornelia spent long hours sitting with her. When her mother slept, Cornelia would open a volume of Byron and read until she awoke.
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Sometime after his wife's death, Dr. Peake moved the family to nearby Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi River, and there Cornelia came of age. Among the inhabitants of Hannibal in those days were little Samuel Clemens and his comical friend Ruel Gridly, supposedly the model for Huckleberry Finn. Cornelia saw them often playing in the street outside her home. Dr. Peake appears as a character in one of Mark Twain's stories.
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Once she was grown, Cornelia regularly visited relatives in St. Louis during the winter social season. It had become a big and lively city by the 1840s and Cornelia enjoyed the round of activities there, especially the glittering dinner parties and balls. She was a favorite of the young bachelor gentlemen of St. Louis, some of whom were U.S. army officers stationed at Jefferson Barracks. Among those she dined and danced with were Lieutenant Ulysses “Sam” Grant and Lieutenant James “Pete” Longstreet.
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It was back in Hannibal, however, that she met her husband-to-be. He was a widower, twenty-three years her senior, named Angus McDonald. A Virginia native, he was educated at West Point but had left the army a year or two after graduation to pursue various adventures, including frontier fur trading, Indian fighting, and real estate speculation. His brother was married to one of Cornelia's sisters. Twenty-five-year-old Cornelia was awed when she first met this “tall, fine-looking,” middle-aged gentleman with such a commanding presence. Angus in turn was captivated by her youthful high spirits, her talents, and her graceful bearing.
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3. Cornelia McDonald, ca. 1890

The two were married in 1847 and took up residence in Virginia, where Angus had a law practice. Cornelia bore a baby within eleven months of the wedding, and eight more over the next thirteen years. The third child, a son, and the last, a daughter, died in infancy. In 1857 the couple settled in Winchester, in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley. Their home was a beautiful estate called Hawthorn, on the edge of town.
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Angus was often away, seeing to his various business and legal dealings. One of his trips took him to England for nearly six months. These absences left Cornelia alone to oversee a household that included six slaves and a hired servant. She proved to be a capable manager and a woman of great strength of will; indeed, she struck some people as imperious, uncompromising, and sharp-tongued. At the same time, however, she embodied many of the qualities that defined the ideal woman in the Old South, for she was pious, nurturing, and devoted to her family.
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When the Civil War broke out, Angus was commissioned a colonel in the Confederate army. He commanded a cavalry regiment for several months in 1861 but his advanced age and deteriorating health rendered him unfit for field duty. Thereafter he served in various desk jobs in Richmond and elsewhere, while Cornelia remained at Hawthorn.
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Winchester was in the path of the invading Northern armies and the town was intermittently occupied by Union forces beginning in March 1862. Living under enemy rule with small children and no husband was an enormously trying experience for Cornelia. Troops frequently searched and pillaged her house and made a wreck of the grounds. Union army authorities quartered sick and wounded soldiers in the house and took over one room for an office. Cornelia lived in fear that they would seize the whole place and throw her and the children out onto the street.
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The periodic recapture of the town by Confederate forces bolstered the spirits of Cornelia and other Winchester residents, but when Robert E. Lee's army retreated south from Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 Cornelia decided that she could not endure another Yankee invasion. Loading the children and some of her belongings into two wagons, and leaving behind her remaining slaves, she set out on the road, joining the many thousands of other Southerners turned into refugees by the war.
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